Office 365, Other Microsoft Cloud Services Go Dark After DNS Error

An outage on Thursday affecting several Microsoft Live services, including Office 365, SkyDrive, Hotmail and MSN, was caused by a DNS error, Microsoft reported.

The company has not released further details yet, saying only that it fixed the problem a few hours after the initial outage.

"We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers," Microsoft wrote in a blog post at 11:49 p.m. PSD.

According to the company, the outage started in Asia-Pacific and then spread to Europe and the Americas. While the initial time of outage has not been disclosed, Microsoft started reporting specific service outages over Twitter around 9:30 p.m. PSD.

However, beating Microsoft to the announcement were multiple online monitoring Web sites, such as downrightnow.com, which reported the issue an hour before.

This is the second time in less than a month that Microsoft's online services have suffered an outage. Office 365, CRM Online and SkyDrive went down briefly in mid-August after a hosting issue hit one of Microsoft's North America datacenters. Microsoft responded to the incident by reducing Office 365 customer bills by 25 percent for the month.

Microsoft has given no word if it will offer a discount due to Thursday's outage.